Harvard University President Accused of Plagiarizing PhD Thesis

first as to the “lie” I had not seen all of the tweets before you posted them. Only a few. So there is added context in that Lewis said she was protesting the statements around teaching medical terminology surrounding sex vs general protesting of saying there are 2 sexes. IMO that is a pretty trivial difference.

Second, you obviously think that the majority, or even sometimes a powerful minority, whether in an institution, or a broader society, imposing its will on everybody else and suppressing dissenting views is natural and OK. You and I are just going to have to disagree. I don’t find it acceptable when moderate republicans cow tow to MAGA, especially when we know many don’t actually believe what they are saying. But they do it due to peer pressure and political survival. Same thing happened in the US during the McCarthy red scare era. To take a more extreme example, in Nazi Germany many Germans who may have otherwise been descent people under peer pressure reported dissenters and Jews, and we all know where that went.

As a society, and especially at colleges, for a democracy to work we have to have some level of tolerance for dissenting views. It’s one thing to disagree, it’s another to suppress. There needs to be a balance. Some views we want suppressed, but most views, even if we disagree with them should not be suppressed.

 

The butt hurt is strong in this thread.

 

really? Does anyone really care if some Uber elitist rich person at Harvard lost their job? Even the rest of higher Ed doesn’t like Harvard lol.

 

It wasn't impossible for her to do the job. She simply didn't want to continue doing it under those circumstances.

It is indeed natural. As for whether it is okay, it depends on the context of the situation. You want to paint it as always bad. I say it is sometimes good and sometimes bad. And if you want to discuss the issue, we gain more from discussing the substance than some hollow principle nobody actually believes in.

Hell, you don't even believe it's always bad. And I know because you have repeatedly avoided answering whether you'd continue to associate with a person you found out is secretly a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

I concur. That's why robust free speech and academic freedom protections are vital. But it doesn't mean that I or anybody else has to be friends or even associate with a person we think has shitty beliefs. That's our choice.

Let me ask a simple question. What should Harvard have done in the Hooven scenario?

Punished the grad student for free speech? Forced Hooven's colleagues to be friends with her? Forced students to associate with her or volunteer to TA for her? It sure seems to me that you're angry that a bunch of people made social choices that you disagree with. How do you purport to police social choices?

 

LMAO! One would think...

Alas, the Left in its entirety, appears to have been inordinately invested in running cover for their pet project's blatant antisemitism.

 

She literally could not teach because she could not get grad assistants after kerfuffle, in spite of having no such issues for 20 years prior and you have to have grad students to conduct a class.

As with everything there are degrees. Of course there are levels that would merit shunning. But they should be the exception not the rule, and certainly not based upon a discussion of whether there in fact two sexes and commentary surrounding academic teaching around it.

Jesus man I’d expect this sort of numbskullery from gator715 or Okeechobee, or Stephanik, but now you? I didn’t avoid it, I didn’t think it was a serious question. FFS no I wouldn’t hang around with Klan members.

Now this is an interesting and substantive question. They probably could have at least publicly supported her in some way as to her prior credentials and accomplishments.

The problem is it is hard to fix, because of the setup. What I would change is I wouldn’t have DEI committees in every department, attending key meetings, and filled with grad students. DEI should be a core value, along with numerous other core values, that are taught and reinforced to staff, not via enforcement mechanism committees.

I do think these colleges should take steps to encourage diversity of thought and tolerance to diversity of thought. It is interesting how diversity of race and various identity metrics are now seemingly THE most important criteria at these schools, but diversity of thought, which used to be a hallmark of universities is now actively discouraged.

Having said that I don’t want to see committees or metrics trying to enforce such diversity of thought, any more that I want to see DEI committees or excess reliance on metrics.

 

She could teach. She said she couldn't teach a specific course because nobody wanted to serve as her TA. Some courses don't require TAs.

As you're saying, the rule is there's a line you don't cross. If a person does, you remove them from your life. You get to draw your lines. Other people gets to draw their own. You're free to say somebody is drawing their line in the wrong place, but they're also free to not care.

Of course not. Because we all have our lines we won't cross.

I don't know how the committees work at Harvard, but in my experience, they're pretty toothless. All they really do is make recommendations and maybe put together trainings. Beyond that, the only real cudgel they have is shaming folks.

As for publicly supporting her, my personal view is that universities should adopt the institutional neutrality recommended by the Kalven Report and stop jumping into these disputes entirely. Of course, Harvard hasn't done that. So yeah, they could have supported her.

I agree. Most people don't have bad hearts. They might have some bad views, but too often, that's because they lack perspective. You might actually persuade some folks if you welcome them into a conversation instead of seeking to ostracize them. But we're human. We all act emotionally sometimes.

I don't agree that it's discouraged (at least as a matter of policy), and I strongly disagree with the implication that people of diverse backgrounds (race, sexual orientation, gender identity, etc.) won't contribute to diversity of thought. Certainly, people can be bad at welcoming different perspectives. That's why it's important to protect free speech and academic freedom on campus.

Understood. One thing I think the Federalist Society gets right, as much as I dislike that organization, is the desire to bring in people from different sides of the ideological spectrum to debate issues of public importance. That sort of thing is valuable. And to the extent students or faculties protest that sort of thing, you just have to tell them to suck it up and get over it. One of the many values universities offer our society is the ability to discuss and debate these sorts of intellectual issues. If they don't like it, don't attend.

 

Bill Ackman's wife, Neri Oxman, a former professor at M.I.T. has been accused of plagiarism.

Wife of Investor Who Pushed for Harvard President’s Exit Is Accused of Plagiarism

"Accusations of plagiarism appear to be the newest weapon in the raging battle over the leadership and direction of elite universities.

"For weeks, William Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund manager, has campaigned on social media against Claudine Gay, who resigned as Harvard’s president amid accusations of plagiarizing other scholars and of not taking a strong enough stand against antisemitism on campus.

"But that battle was brought home after Business Insider, an online publication, posted similar accusations of plagiarism against Mr. Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman, an architect and designer, who holds a Ph.D. in design computation from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"Business Insider said on Friday that Dr. Oxman 'stole sentences and whole paragraphs from Wikipedia, other scholars and technical documents in her academic writing.'"
_________________
Academic celebrity Neri Oxman plagiarized from Wikipedia, scholars, a textbook, and other sources without any attribution

• Neri Oxman, a former star professor at MIT, admitted to lifting passages from other scholars' work in her dissertation.
• Business Insider found 28 additional instances of plagiarism in her dissertation and other papers.
• Oxman lifted text from more than a dozen Wikipedia articles without attribution.

"Neri Oxman, a former MIT professor and celebrity within the world of academia, stole sentences and whole paragraphs from Wikipedia, other scholars, and technical documents in her academic writing, Business Insider has found."
_____________________

https://www.timesofisrael.com/israe...nd academic,number of instances of plagiarism.

"Israeli-born designer and academic Prof. Neri Oxman, the wife of billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, has apologized for several errors in her 2010 dissertation, after Business Insider alleged it contained a number of instances of plagiarism."

 

Bill Ackman says it is a 'near certainty' that academics will improperly cite others' work after his wife admitted to plagiarism

"Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman softened his tone on academic dishonesty after a report by Business Insider found his wife, Neri Oxman, plagiarized portions of her doctoral dissertation.

"In an extensive, 5,139-word post on X made Saturday evening, Ackman — who led the crusade to get Harvard President Claudine Gay to resign over plagiarism allegations — said it is 'a near certainty that authors will miss some quotation marks and fail to properly cite or provide attribution for another author on at least a modest percentage of the pages of their papers.'

"'Some plagiarism is due to the laziness of the author. Laziness is not a great excuse for a member of the faculty, but it does not seem like a crime to me,' Ackman wrote. 'It is more a reflection of the competency and motivation of the faculty member. In the real world, employees can be fired for being lazy, but this can be challenging to do under the tenure system.'

"Ackman's softened stance on plagiarism is a marked difference from his statements made less than a week ago, in which he called allegations of plagiarism against Gay "a scandal and a stain on the reputation of Harvard."

 

Not surprising at all. He wanted Gay out, so he said whatever he needed to say to get his way. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, we should extend the grace he fought Gay from receiving. Thing is, I agree with the bold. Unfortunately, he didn't as recently as a few days ago.

 

As I said pages ago the plagiarism accusations were a red herring. This is all about what a Jewish hedge fund billionaire construed as “anti-semitism” and he wanted her canceled for it. Hilarious watching all the conservatives on here frothing at the mouth to cancel Claudine Gay after railing against “cancel culture” the last few years. So comically full of shit and predictable.

 

LOL, SEC and IRS investigations approaching!

 

the “left”? What is that exactly? I’ve seen plenty of liberals in this thread happy to see her resign. Are they a part of “the left”?

 

(Helpful hint for MAGA Nation: Michelle's was first.)

 

The funny part of all of this: there is a much better case that his wife actually did commit plagiarism. The example that I saw was a word-for-word copy of Wikipedia. Certainly a better example of plagiarism than both authors using the same concept names.

 

Dude comes across as a super whiny bitch. He picked a fight and got punched in the mouth. FAFO.